Co-workers 2009
Alex Carmo 
I am in the T-cell Biology Group on sabbatical leave, visiting Oxford for the second time – before (1991-1996) I had been based at the Dunn School, and obtained my DPhil in 1995 from Wolfson College. I have a background in Biochemistry (Univ. Lisbon) and a Masters in Immunology (Univ. Porto), and have a deep interest in signal transduction in T lymphocytes.
In the last years I have been interested in the role of receptors of the Scavenger receptor cysteine-rich family such as CD5 and CD6 in the regulation of T cell activation, as well as in the characterization of other members, like our newest acquaintance SSc5D (platypucin). I came to the TCBG to learn the concepts of TCR triggering, and a number of in-house designed approaches (rigorous BRET, TCCD, DysCo) to better understand the topology of the T cell surface (and how to get activation without actual triggering).
Outside the lab, and unlike Dave, I seem to be unable to find pubs without tourists, which must mean that I’m a tourist myself. Also, it appears I have brought a lot of rain from my native Portugal.
Billur Akkaya
I was born and grew up in the Aegean part of Turkey - the birthplace of ancient philosophy. After completing my degree in the Faculty of Medicine at Hacettepe University in Ankara, I joined the T-cell Biology Group as a D.Phil student in October 2008. My project here is co-supervised by Simon Davis and Richard Cornall.
My interest in scientific research began when I was a medical student. I attended several post-graduate level immunology, biochemistry and molecular biology lectures as a guest student in the Health Sciences Institute of Hacettepe University and tried to gain scientific insight and laboratory experience during my summer internships in the Glycobiology and Radiobiology Research Institutes of the University of Oxford. During my internships, I was very much inspired by the research atmosphere of Oxford and decided to apply for a place here after completing my medical degree. Amongst all the disciplines that I have had some experience of, I have always been interested in immunology the most. From a medical point of view, modulation of the immune system seems to have a key role in the solution of diverse health problems such as cancer, infections and autoimmune diseases. My project here is focused on understanding the role of costimulatory molecules, particularly PD-1 and ICOS, in autoimmune disease settings and investigating the consequences of modulating their function.
I live with another scientist, my husband Munir, who is also a D.Phil student, in the Cellular Immunology Unit at the Dunn School which shouldn’t necessarily mean we discuss immunology all day long. Besides immunology, I am very much interested in art and spend my spare time with oil painting on canvas and charcoal drawing.
Carine Gonçalves
to be updated
Chao Yu
I am from the south part of China and completed my Masters degree study at the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry, Chinese Academy of Science in 1999. Then I joined the group supervised by Prof. Gunter Fishcer in the Max-Planck Research Unit on the Enzymology of Protein Folding in Germany to continue my PhD studies. My PhD research was focussed on the study of protein-protein interactions based on matrix-bound peptide arrays, and the study of catalysis of the peptidyl-prolyl cis/trans isomerization of fluoroproline containing protein and peptide substrates by PPIases.
I started my post-doctoral position in the T-cell biology group in Oxford immediately after finishing my PhD study in 2003. Therefore, I now have a good opportunity to pursue my scientific interests in protein-protein interactions, mainly focusing on T-cell surface proteins which is an exciting and challenging field. My study of the interactions between T-cell surface proteins is mainly based on structural methods.
Charlotte Whicher
I completed my A-levels in York where I live and grew up, and am now studying Physiological Sciences at Oxford. I joined the T-cell biology group for 2 months at the end of my 2nd year to collect data for my dissertation. I worked alongside Mai on a novel mutagenesis strategy the group is developing to investiagte buried surface in protein complexes as well as performing some antibody epitope mapping. After I complete my course at Oxford I want to continue in Biomedical research and will hopefully do a PhD.
Daian Cheng
to be updated
Dave Sleep
Having grown up in a sleepy sea-side town on the South coast, following my A-levels I escaped to Southampton University where I spent two and a half years studying Biology with Oceanography. Seeing the error of my ways after all that time, I switched to a pure Biology honours BSc so that I could study parasitology and immunology in the last half of my final year.
After graduation I worked for a year with the Health Protection Agency in Southampton General Hospital testing blood, urine and other revolting patient samples for even more revolting diseases. Deciding I wasn’t quite ready for the real world yet, I moved to London to study at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for an MSc in the Immunology of Infectious Diseases. The course was absolutely fantastic and persuaded me that a PhD was the way forward. After some searching, I was offered an interview for a D.Phil. in Simon’s lab and was given the position.
My D.Phil. centres around the introduction of a number of immune effector molecules on to B16-F10 melanoma cells so that we may elicit an immune response against them in an appropriate model. I also work with John James making conjugated Fab fragments for the investigation of single molecule cell movements on the T cell surface.
Outside the lab you’ll find me either cycling, climbing up a wall, kayaking (on a river!), playing rugby, running, or just trying to find a decent pub with no undergraduates or tourists in.
Jiandong Huo
After completing an undergraduate degree in Medical Microbiology & Immunology at Newcastle University, I came to join the T-cell biology group last October to start my D. Phil, funded by the Clarendon fund and a Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine (NDM) Research Prize.
Working in the T-cell biology group is a completely different experience for me. My previous research experience involved functional studies of a cell wall protein and a cellular protein in Bacillus subtilis (an experimental system for Gram-Positive bacteria), in Prof. Errington’s group. My current work focuses on investigating the first stage of the intracellular signaling network in T cells, i.e. the binding of SH2-domain containing proteins to the phosphorylated cytoplasmic tails of cell surface receptors, aiming to build up a systemic model of the network of such interactions in a T cell.
Edward Evans
I co-manage the T-cell biology group as well as continuing my own projects. For more details please go to my page.
Heather Walsh
After completing A-levels in my home town Burnley, in Lancashire, I came to Oxford to do a degree in biochemistry at St Hildas college. During the final year of my degree I specialized in glycobiology and human disease, and completed a project which focussed on the relationship between P-glycoprotein, lipid raft composition and multidrug resistance in cancer. I also developed a keen interest in immunology.
I joined the T-cell biology group in July 2003, a mere three weeks after my final examination. My projects involve cloning, expressing and purifying CD28 and its family members for crystallography and binding studies. In my spare time I enjoying water colour painting, taking my inspiration from Oxford's beautiful architecture.
Jan Fennelly
I trained in medical laboratory sciences in Newcastle prior to entering research working on cell surface receptors. Later I decided that a change was in order and moved to Oxford to work on OX40 and CD4 in Neil Barclay’s lab at the Dunn School. Then followed a brief departure back north to Manchester where I worked in Mike Dexter’s lab and completed a part-time BSc in applied biological sciences.
I have now worked in the T-cell biology group for seven years, taking part in many projects, including the expression and purification of B7 and related co-stimulatory proteins. More recently my main focus has been on RACE of new CD2 family members and GLGI of novel genes identified in the lab during SAGE analysis.
In my spare time I enjoy growing vegetables on my allotment and creating stained glass windows.
Mafalda Santos
I joined Davis’ Lab as a visiting student for 6 months from January 2009. I’m from Lisbon and there I completed my degree in Molecular Cell Biology, at the University of Lisbon. During my final training period I decided to move on and straight away found myself flying to London where I worked at the School of Pharmacy, University of London, under the supervision of Prof. John Moses, working with “click chemistry” towards the discovery of novel telomerase inhibitors. After finishing my degree in 2006 I went to Porto and joined Alex Carmo’s group at IBMC and a year later, I started my PhD. My work is based on the study of the role of CD5 and CD6 in the regulation of T cell activation.
Outside the lab (as inside) one quote “One life, live it well!” … and so I try!!!
Mai Vuong
After completing my BSc Biochemistry degree from Kingston University, I went on to do a Masters in Biochemical Engineering at University College London. This course gave me an insight into how successful laboratory results can be scaled-up to industrial scale production from the engineering and business point of view. However, having spent a couple of years in this field, I decided that academic research on the mini bench scale was the life for me.
I joined the T-cell biology group in October 2000 and have since been involved in a wide range of projects including cloning the genes of 11 members of the CD2 family, creating host cell lines geared towards structural genomics and making Long SAGE cDNA libraries.
In addition to my many changing interests outside of work, I have recently devoted the other half of my life to the Luk Chi Fu martial arts association (www.lukchifu.co.uk) and have performed lion dancing for various associations around Britain. This is all for fitness purposes of course.
Ricardo Fernandes
After deciding that biochemistry was definitely my choice for my first degree I went on to spend 4 years discovering cells, proteins, pathways and reactions while having great fun at University of Porto, Portugal. As an undergraduate I worked at IBMC (Instituto Biologia Molecular e Celular, Porto) studying transthyretin 3-D structure with Prof Ana Margarida Damas and later studied cellular stress using a yeast model with Prof Pedro Moradas Ferreira, again at IBMC. Following this new challenge I joined Prof Suresh Rattan, at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, for a 6 month project under the ERASMUS program, where I literally tracked hundreds of fibroblasts to understand the effects of stress and ageing on both motility and cell division.
After this period in Denmark I almost immediately joined the T-Cell biology Group to work towards my D.Phil. Learning with John James, I started expressing fluorescent tagged proteins at the cell surface in order to image them at the single molecule level in collaboration with Prof David Klenerman's Group in Cambridge. My other major projects focus on T-cell receptor triggering – which is still one of the major unresolved problems in T-cell biology - trying to understand, at molecular level, how signals crosses the T cell membrane.
Sreenu Vattipally
I come from Ramancha, a small village in Andhra Pradesh, India. After completing my schooling in Ramancha, I went on to do a Bachelors degree at the Government Degree college, Siddipet, and my Masters in Microbiology at the Osmania University, Hyderabad.
Following my masters, I pursued my PhD in the Laboratory of Computational Biology at the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad. I was under the supervision of one of India's eminent computational biologists, Dr.H. A. Nagarajaram. My PhD research work was the first to show the role of microsatellites' in mycobacterial pathogenesis. In addition, the work also provided new insights into the influence of microsatellite repeat number variations in fusion, fission and premature termination of genes in mycobacterial genomes.
I joined the T-cell biology group as a bioinfomatician in the summer of 2006. My work mainly
involves analysing SAGE data by means of computational analysis. In my spare time I play chess,
SuDoku and the keyboard. I am a computer geek and love familiarizing myself with new software.
Veronica Chang
I obtained a D. Phil from Oxford University in 2003. I had been studying the biology of foraminifera since I was an undergraduate. Foraminifera is a marine single-cell protist, and has a very distinct phenomenon in its cellular biology – the cell engulfs seawater as vacuoles into the cytoplasm, and then molecular-mediated crystallisation takes place in these vacuoles to form their new CaCO3 shells. Foraminifera shells are the most important biological materials in the Earth Sciences since the composition of their CaCO3 skeletons has provided us with information about the history of ocean circulation and climate change. Thanks to its interesting process of seawater vacuolisation, foraminifera is also a very promising research model for studying the transportation of Mg and Ca from seawater into their shells.
It might seem odd that someone with my experiences would be interested in a post in molecular immunology, but in a rather convoluted way, this seems to be a right path. My previous work can be divided into three parts: (1) foraminifera cell biology and ecology, (2) the regulation of trace elements, and (3) the biomineralisation of foraminifera. In 1992, I started to work on foraminifera biology at Taiwan University under the supervision of Professor C.-Y. Huang. My primary responsibility was to identify foraminifera species and to correlate their assemblage changes to the environments. The Cd2+ caught my interest, and I had the good fortune of being co-supervised by Professor S.-C. Pai, an expert on analytical chemistry.
In 1998, I came under the tutelage of Professor Sir R. Keith O’Nions at Oxford. I initiated an unprecedented approach – using Mg and Ca stable isotopes – to study an extremely exciting subject, the biomineralisation of foraminifera. The lack of any research techniques available for such a study meant that the first challenge was - to design new chromatography and mass spectrometry techniques to purify samples for high precision measurement, using MC-ICPMS (multiple collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry). These techniques enabled me to report the first ever Mg isotope composition of biological samples. However, these techniques can be applied to fields beyond that of biogeochemistry: among other things, they can shed light on the diet changes in archaeological studies by analysing the Ca and Mg isotopes of teeth and bone remains. These techniques have been published in J. Anal. At. Spectrom. 18 (2003) 296-301. The second part of my thesis work was to apply the techniques to study biomineralisation. I analysed natural foraminifera samples, seawater and laboratory crystallised samples, and discovered to my delight that the combination of Mg and Ca isotopes constitutes a powerful new tool to distinguish the different mechanisms in which Mg and Ca are involved in cell biology. A paper based on these results was submitted to Science and went on review. Although it was finally thought by the reviewers that yet more evidence should have been marshalled, the experience was nonetheless an encouragement for me and I obtained a much better appreciation of the rigorous standard of first-class science.
During my study of foraminifera, the process of seawater vacuolisation was what most caught my attention. The seawater vacuolisation of foraminifera occurs periodically during its life cycle and is believed to be triggered by cell stress, which may be similar to the initiation of phagocytosis. As I learned the phagocytosis of lymphocyte is not only through pinocytosis but also by opsonisation, I became very interested. What is more exciting is the phagocyte can present the digested antigen on its cell surface to bind T-cell receptor to trigger cell-mediated immunity. Up to this point, I have been completely attracted by such a fascinating recognition and communication network and came to an understanding that to do lymphocyte cell surface biology research is a wise long term career strategy.
I joined the T-cell biology group in July 2003. Although at this point, I have yet to learn all the biochemistry techniques and related knowledge, the group has been very helpful and I am a quick learner and very keen on exploring new disciplines. Versatile methodologies have been carried out in this lab, and among other things, I am eager to see the if my previous research experiences on isotopes, chromatography and MS might one day have an impact on protein structure analysis and T-cell biology.
Xiao-Xiao Cheng
to be updated